In Depth:  Michael Haykin

history

Michael Haykin

As we saw last month, the church has not always responded to epidemics or pandemics well.

But one sterling occasion when she did was during the outbreak of the bubonic plague in southern England in 1665.

history

Michael Haykin

As historians look at history, they seek to discern the forces or people that have shaped the past. My own historical convictions have led me to focus on people as the main actors on the stage of history, not economic force or ideologies per se. Yet, there is definitely a place to evaluate the impact of such forces as these, or that of pandemics.

For instance, consider the impact of pestilence on the forces of the Athenian Empire during the early stages of the Peloponnesian War with Sparta and her allies, a war made famous by the Greek historian Thucydides. The loss of the Athenian general Pericles (c.495‒429BC) to this plague may well have affected Athenian fortunes in that war. The conquest of the Aztec world by the Spaniard Hernán Cortés was largely facilitated by a smallpox epidemic that the Spanish conquerors brought with them and against which the Aztecs had no natural immunity.

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Michael Haykin

When John Rogers (c.1570–1636) first went up to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as a student in February 1588, he proved to be a complete wastrel.

His way was being paid by his uncle, a well-known Puritan preacher by the name of Richard Rogers (1551–1618), but John sold all of his books so as to spend the proceeds on various sinful pastimes. Not surprisingly, John was asked to leave Emmanuel College, a hotbed of Puritan theology and piety.

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Michael Haykin

We are five years away from the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea that was designed to bring an end to what historians call the Arian controversy.

This was the controversy engendered by the denial of the deity of both the Lord Jesus and the Holy Spirit by an Alexandrian elder named Arius in the late 310s. Instead, the Council initiated a further 60 years of intense theological reflection and controversy. It led eventually to the promulgation of the Creed of Constantinople (381) in which the full divinity of Christ and His Spirit are confessed, and, implicitly, the formula – one God in three persons – taken as essential grammar for our speaking about God.

history

Michael Haykin

In 1856, English chemistry student William Henry Perkin (1838–1907) was looking for a cure for malaria – he stumbled upon a way to make a synthetic purple dye from coal tar.

In so doing, he literally changed history, for his discovery led to advances in medicine, photography, perfumery, food production, and revolutionised the fashion industry.

history

Michael Haykin

Often when people think of Jonathan Edwards as a preacher, his famous 1741 Enfield sermon ‘Sinners in the hands of an angry God’ is what first comes to mind. But the reality is that Edwards preached more often on heaven.

His sermon ‘Heaven, a world of love’, preached a few years before the Enfield sermon, was actually more typical of Edwards’ sermonic corpus. He was, as a number of books on Edwards have recently emphasised, preeminently a theologian of love. His concern for the salvation and welfare of native Americans in Massachusetts is another good example of this focus.

history

Michael Haykin

When Jonathan Edwards, who has been rightly described as ‘America’s Augustine’, left his pastoral charge in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1750, he received a number of ‘attractive’ ministry offers, including the presidency of a theological college in Scotland. He chose instead to go with his family to a small out-of-the-way frontier village by the name of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Why this unusual choice?

Some have surmised that Edwards settled in Stockbridge because the rigours of ministry among a smaller congregation, which consisted mostly of Mahican Indians, would prove minimal, and he could then devote himself largely to his study and the major treatises that he wanted to write books on such issues as free will and original sin.

history

Michael Haykin

Not long before his death in 1631, the Anglican poet and cleric John Donne (1572–1631) penned a series of what he called ‘Holy Sonnets’.

In the fourth of them he employed the metaphors of treason and theft to express his fear of facing the judgement of God:

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Michael Haykin

One of the great lacunae of the English-speaking Evangelical memory relates to France. For far too many English-speaking Evangelicals assume that after the Reformation France was a monolithic Roman Catholic bastion. But, for example, when John Calvin died in 1564, there were nearly 2 million Evangelicals in France, 10% of the entire population. And these believers and their churches had a rich hist-ory in the years after Calvin’s death.

Historians know this Christian tradition as the Huguenots and they produced some remarkably fine Christians and preachers. Consider, for instance, the preacher Jean Claude (1619–1687), the quarter-centenary of whose birth is this year and who, in his own day, was considered a model of preaching excellence and compared to John Chrysostom in the Ancient Church.

history

Michael Haykin

‘Sacred Scripture … is placed high on a throne.’

So said Augustine (354– 430) who, like other Patristic authors, believed without hesitation that God had caused the Bible to be written.

history

Michael Haykin

Far too many communities of contempor-ary Western evangelicals are in a parlous state: some are captive to right-wing pol-itical ideologies (especially in the United States); others, if the truth be told, are dubious about any real success of the gos-pel in a secular state; while yet others are being consumed by faddishness in their pursuit of being relevant.

All of these various groups, indeed all of us, desperately need to realise our great need of the Holy Spirit, without whom we can do nothing of real spiritual value and without whom we can never hope to flourish. And here the Victorian preacher C.H. Spurgeon can help us enormously.

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Michael Haykin

Remembering the life of H M Gwatkin and the British Empire

The name of Henry Melvill Gwatkin (1844–1916) has long been a familiar one through his standard examination of the Arian heresy, Studies of Arianism (1882), which remains a classical study of this ancient heresy.

history

Michael Haykin

The Ancient Church gives us three great gifts: the doctrine of the Trinity, the canon of the New Testament, and the works of the African pastor-theologian Augustine (354–430).

Some might be surprised to see the last in this list, but the truth of the matter is that we, who are heirs of Western Christianity, are all Augustinians, so profound has been his influence.

history

Michael Haykin

From time to time in the history of the Church, God raises up men, who, because of their God-given talents, exercise extraordinary influence for good.

In the Ancient Church, Athanasius and Augustine were such pastor-theologians as they defended the Christian Faith. At the time of the Reformation, Martin Luther and John Calvin were critical to the advance of that great movement of God. In more recent times, Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones played a central role in the recovery of the doctrines of grace among British Evangelicals. And in his day, especially among members of his community, the Particular or Calvinistic Baptists, John Gill may rightly be reckoned, in the words of Lloyd-Jones, ‘a very great man, and an exceptionally able man’.

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Michael Haykin

During and after World War I, many English-speaking Evangelicals were hoping and praying that one positive result of the horrors of that war would be a great awakening of men and women to their sin and their need for the Saviour.

It was not to be; but there were local revivals, a century on, that we should remember.

history

Michael Haykin

Sadly forgotten today, the Baptist writer Anne Steele (1717–1778), has been rightly called the ‘mother of the English hymn’, and at the close of the 19th century she was as famous as Isaac Watts, John Newton or William Cowper.

Anne was the daughter of William Steele, the Pastor of the Particular Baptist Chapel in Broughton, Hampshire, a village situated roughly mid-way between Salisbury and Winchester. Converted in 1732 and baptised the same year, she grew to be a woman of deep piety, genuine cheerfulness, and blessed with a mind hungry for knowledge. Her piety was wrought in the furnace of affliction. She wrestled most of her adult life, it appears, with ongoing bouts of tertian malaria and terrible stomach pain.

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Michael Haykin

Diary-keeping as a spiritual discipline especially developed among the Puritans, and we possess a good number of these texts that help to open up the inner world of their authors.

A good example is the diary left by the third daughter of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards, Esther Edwards Burr (1732–1758), as she is known now.

history

Michael Haykin

‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’.

This famous first line by L.P. Hartley (1895–1972) in his novel The Go-Between (1953) has long been a favourite maxim that orients my teaching of history, for it is notoriously difficult to treat former eras of history with the degree of empathy that they need to make them understandable.

history

Michael Haykin

Some of the eras of church history are clearly more momentous than others.

The fourth century, for example, saw the resolution of the Arian controversy with the landmark statement of the Nicene Creed; the 16th century witnessed the massive recovery of gospel truth, and the 18th century saw the transatlantic revivals that laid the foundations for modern Evangelicalism.

history

Michael Haykin

Of all the 16th-century Reformers, John Calvin (1506–1564) was the most reluctant to discuss details of his life in works destined for public consumption.

As he told Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto: ‘I am not eager to speak about myself.’ He had, as historian Heiko Oberman once aptly put it, a ‘dislike of self-disclosure.’

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Michael Haykin

Geneva was not a large city. During Calvin’s lifetime it reached a peak of slightly more than 21,000 by 1560, of whom a goodly number were religious refugees.

Nevertheless, it became the missionary centre of Europe in this period of the Reformation. Calvin sought to harness the energies and gifts of many of the religious refugees so as to make Geneva central to the expansion of Reformation thought and piety throughout Europe. This meant training and preparing many of these refugees to go back to their native lands as evangelists and reformers.

history

Michael Haykin

In seeking to re-evangelise Europe, the Reformers made powerful use of the latest technology at their disposal, namely, the printing press.

By Calvin’s death in 1564, his interest in Christian publishing meant that there were no less than 34 printing-houses in Geneva, which printed Bibles and Christian literature in a variety of European languages. In the 1550s particularly, Geneva was a hive of biblical editions and translations.

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Michael Haykin

Calvin is insistent that believers must actively employ their strength to bring God’s salvation to others.

In his sermon on Deuteronomy 33.18-19 Calvin can thus argue that it is not enough to be involved in God’s service. Christians need to be drawing others to serve and adore God. Specifically, how does God use the strength of Christians? Calvin’s answer is that it is by their words and by their deeds.

history

Michael Haykin

Last month we begin to think about the argument that the Reformers had no missionary vision or passion.

This month we continue to ponder this important theme by looking at John Calvin’s thinking about the missionary advance of the church.

history

Michael Haykin

The 16th-century Reformers had a poorly-developed missiology and overseas mission was an area to which they gave little thought.

That is what is said. ‘Yes’, this argument runs, ‘they rediscovered the apostolic gospel, but they had no vision to spread it to the uttermost parts of the earth.’ Possibly the first author to raise the question about this failure of early Protestantism was the Roman Catholic theologian and controversialist, Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621). He argued that one of the marks of a true church was its continuity with the missionary passion of the apostles. In his mind, Roman Catholicism’s missionary activity was indisputable and this supplied a strong support for its claim to stand in solidarity with the apostles.

history

Michael Haykin

As noted last month, in his preaching John Calvin began at the beginning of a book and expounded it passage by passage, clause by clause, sermon after sermon, until he came to the end.

Then he started on another book. This way of preaching was not unique to Calvin in the Reformation. Others like Huldrych Zwingli had used it. And, well before them, some of the early Christian preachers, like John Chrysostom, had preached in this way.

history

Michael Haykin

What is the heart of the Reformation?

If we wish to see this fleshed out, we can do no better than to look at John Calvin’s ministry as a preacher. After Calvin came to Geneva in 1536, he looked upon his work in the Swiss city as primarily ‘proclaiming the Word of God’ and ‘instructing believers in wholesome doctrine’. He was, of course, involved in the other aspects of pastoral work, but at the centre of his ministry was the preaching of gospel. By this means, Calvin said time and again, God reveals himself in judgment and mercy, turning hearts to obedience, confirming the faith of believers, building up and purifying the church.

history

Michael Haykin

There was a great division in the ranks of the Reformers over an issue of spirituality.

It concerned one of the means of grace, namely the Lord’s Supper. While all of the Reformers clearly rejected the Roman Catholic dogma of transubstantiation and the superstitions that had arisen with it, they were deeply divided over the answer to the question, ‘How is Christ present at the Table?’

history

Michael Haykin

It is without doubt one of the most important treatises in the history of the church.

I refer to Martin Luther’s The Freedom of a Christian (1520), sometimes called Christian Liberty. It is a powerful, yet succinct and polemic-free, statement of Luther’s position on how a person is saved and what that entails.

history

Michael Haykin

The Reformers spilled much ink debating the legitimacy of the papacy with their Roman Catholic opponents.

Given the centrality of the papacy, that is not very surprising. Martin Luther began serious study of it in the early months of 1519. He soon became convinced that the authority claimed by the Pope was questionable. The Pope was not the head of the Church. Final authority lay in Scripture and duly-called councils.

history

Michael Haykin

By nature, Martin Luther was not a rebel.

The protest that has come to be called the 95 Theses took him along a pathway he never envisioned when he first put pen to paper. What began as a simple critique of the misguided piety of the Roman Church ended in taking Luther and his colleagues at the University of Wittenberg to the remarkable place of forming a new church, or, as Luther would have put it, guiding the church back to its biblical foundations.

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Michael Haykin

Recently, British historian Alec Ryrie has described Katherine Willoughby as an ‘evangelical firebrand’ and perhaps ‘the most aggressive of the reformers’ within the royal circle around Henry VIII.

A hostile Spanish Roman Catholic source described her as ‘one of the worst heretics in England’.

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Michael Haykin

Between 1550 and his death in 1564, John Calvin’s output of published words was never less than a 100,000 per year.

And supreme among all of these published words were those of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, which led the German Lutheran Philip Melanchthon to dub Calvin ‘the theologian’.

history

Michael Haykin

To see the heart of the Reformation fleshed out, we can do no better than to look at John Calvin’s ministry as a preacher.

After Calvin came to Geneva in 1536, he looked upon his work in the Swiss city as primarily ‘proclaiming the Word of God’ and ‘instructing believers in wholesome doctrine’. He was, of course, involved in the other aspects of pastoral work, but at the centre of his ministry was preaching the gospel. By this means, Calvin said time and again, God reveals himself in judgment and mercy, turning hearts to obedience, confirming the faith of believers, building up and purifying the church.

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Michael Haykin

Very few of the Anabaptists, whom we began to look at last month, were trained theologians.

This meant that there was a range of theological diversity among the Anabaptists. Some denied the Trinity, some affirmed that Christ’s humanity was eternal, ‘celestial flesh’, and some rejected the Bible as the inspired Word of God. Not surprisingly, the theological errors of such people marred the entire movement for mainstream Reformers like Luther and John Calvin. But the movement really needs to be judged on the best of its thinking.

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Michael Haykin

There are Roman Catholics and Protestants.

One of the legacies of the Reformation is the emergence of these two main religious groups in Western Europe claiming to be Christian. And though they disagreed with each other on key matters that this column has already noted – issues like the nature of salvation and the question of religious authority – it is important to recognise that both groups were agreed that the state had a vital role to play in the life of the church. Like their RC opponents, most 16th-century Protestants could not envision a world where state and church were not working together for the cause of Christ.

history

Michael Haykin

The English Reformer Hugh Latimer (c.1495–1555), whose early life we looked at last month, preached hundreds of sermons, but there are only 41 extant.

Of these, 28 were preached at Grimsthorpe, Lincolnshire, at the estate of Katherine Willoughby (1519–1580), the Dowager Duchess of Suffolk, or to country congregations near to her castle.

history

Michael Haykin

Historian Iain Murray has rightly noted: ‘The advance of the church is ever preceded by a recovery of preaching [the Word].’

The Reformation, a time of great spiritual advance, was no exception. Now, among the remarkable cadre of preachers raised up during the Reformation, the English preacher Hugh Latimer (c.1495–1555) deserves more attention than he is often given in accounts of the English Reformation. The 20th-century historian Patrick Collinson once described Latimer as one of the greatest English-speaking preachers of the 16th century. And according to Augustine Bernher (fl.1550s –1570s), a Francophone pastor who was mentored by Latimer and later pastored during the reign of Elizabeth I (1533–1603), ‘if England ever had a prophet, he was one’.

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Michael Haykin

There is a portrait of William Tyndale that hangs in the dining-hall of Hertford College, Oxford.

His right hand in the painting is pointing to what appears to be a Bible, under which there is a Latin couplet, of which the translation runs thus:

history

Michael Haykin

In 1552, an English Protestant named John Rogers was on trial for his Christian faith.

Rogers, who had been converted through the witness of William Tyndale, was told by Stephen Gardiner, the Lord Chancellor of Mary I and the man who was judging his case, that ‘thou canst prove nothing by the Scripture, the Scripture is dead: it must have a lively [i.e. living] expositor’. ‘No’, Rogers replied, ‘the Scriptures are alive’.

history

Michael Haykin

Reformation opponents saw its reinterpretation of the spirituality of marriage as one of its most scandalous aspects.

The standard line during the long medieval era had been that a robust Christian life could only be found in a state of celibacy. The early medieval author Bede (died 735) expressed this conviction when he maintained that the apostolic injunction to pray always could not be fulfilled if one was married and engaging in sexually intimate acts. Sex precluded a robust prayer life.

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Michael Haykin

Nearly 30 years ago an extremely learned theologian and scholar wrote this:

‘[Martin] Luther, in the conflict between his search for salvation and the tradition of the Church, ultimately came to experience the Church, not as the guarantor, but as the adversary of salvation.’ Those are the words of Joseph Ratzinger! At the time he wrote them, he was the Prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith for the Church of Rome and, of course, he later became Pope Benedict XVI.

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Michael Haykin

One of the good gifts that God has given to human beings is that of memory.

Remembering our own personal past is absolutely vital to knowing who we are and having a sense of personal identity. We all know how diseases that ravage a person’s memory destroy the ability of that person to function in any meaningful way in the present.

history

Michael Haykin

Contrary to popular opinion, Christians are not averse to change.

Many of them, for example, have been eager to embrace new forms of technology for the sake of gospel propagation.

history

Michael Haykin

This past summer saw significant controversy on the Internet over the doctrine of the Trinity .

Debate over the Trinity, from time to time, has given rise to some of the fiercest of church debates. Much of the theological energy of the fourth century was consumed with defeating the threat of Arianism. And in the 18th century a growing tide of rationalism led to what historian Philip Dixon has called a ‘fading of the trinitarian imagination’ and to the doctrine of the Trinity coming under heavy attack. Informed by the Enlightenment’s confidence in human reason, the intellectual mindset of this era either increasingly dismissed the doctrine of the Trinity as a philosophical and unbiblical construct of the post-Apostolic Church and turned to classical Arianism as an alternative perspective. Or they simply ridiculed it as illogical and argued for Deism or Unitarianism.

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Michael Haykin

The Greek Christian author Basil of Caesarea (c.330 – 379) was an extremely important theologian.

His defence of the deity of the Holy Spirit in the final stages of the Arian controversy played a critical role in the formulation of the orthodox Christian teaching about the Trinity. Basil has much to teach us, though, about other areas of the Christian life. Take, for instance, the vital area of Christian friendship.

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Michael Haykin

Sociologist Rodney Stark has estimated the growth in the number of professing Christians during the first three centuries AD.

It went from roughly a few thousand around 40AD, comprising .0017% of the population – based on an estimated population of 60 million in the entire Roman Empire – to over 6,000,000 by 300AD, roughly 10.5% of the total population, assuming the size of the population remained fairly stable. Why did such growth take place?

history

Michael Haykin

Up to the 18th century, theologians regularly considered the concept of beauty to be central to any discussion of God.

As these theologians read the Bible, especially the Hebrew Scriptures, they were struck by various places where God is described as beautiful.

history

Michael Haykin

We know little about John Calvin’s marriage to Idelette van Buren (aka Idelette de Bure).

That is certainly true when compared to the marriages of other Reformers. Martin Luther’s famous marriage to Katharina von Bora, for example, became something of a public exemplar for Protestants.

history

Michael Haykin

It was in the autumn of 1790.

Before wintry weather made the 20 miles or so between Olney, Buckinghamshire, and Everton, Bedfordshire, quite difficult for travel, two Baptist pastors wended their way to an Anglican parish for a few hours’ visit with its vicar. For much of the 18th century, many Baptists and Anglicans had been like the Jews and Samaritans of old: they had ‘no dealings’ with one another (John 4.9). But times were rightly changing, and Baptists were coming to realise that it was the better part of wisdom to build friendships with gospel-centred Anglicans.

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Michael Haykin

The frequenting of coffee shops by many modern-day students to study, converse and plug into the internet is actually tapping into a much older phenomenon that goes back to the late 17th- and early 18th-century coffeehouses of England.

Unlike taverns, coffeehouses came to be recognised, as historian Brian Cowan has noted in his excellent study The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (2005), as serious centres for learning.

history

Michael Haykin

The hymns of Isaac Watts and the conversion of George Thomson

George Thomson’s dates are 1698–1782.

history

Michael Haykin

‘The name of Erasmus will never perish’.

This comment in a 1516 letter by John Colet, one of Erasmus’ (c.1466−1536) scholarly friends, says much about the way that Erasmus was viewed by many in his day: he was, without doubt, the most famous scholar of his time. The illegitimate son of a priest, Erasmus was born at Gouda in the Netherlands between 1465 and 1469. His early education was with the Brethren of the Common Life, a semi-monastic movement of lay people founded in the Netherlands by Gerard Groote. Erasmus studied in this communal context for eleven years or so and it was here that he began his study of Greek that would lead to his fame later in life.

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Michael Haykin

The last 20 years or so have thrust to the fore of evangelical consciousness our great need to share the gospel with Muslims.

But Christian concern about the salvation of those devoted to the teachings of Muhammad is nothing new. One ancient vista from which to see the way that Christians responded to Islam during the very earliest period of Muslim expansion in the seventh and eighth centuries are the writings of the theologian John of Damascus (c.655/675 – c.749). John had clearly taken the time to understand Islamic views and thinking, and was quite familiar with the Qur’an in Arabic, though his language about Islam could at times be somewhat intemperate.

history

Michael Haykin

Every Christian ought to be an informed historian.

Though it was written 200 years ago, Jane Austen’s fiction is still popular, since so much of it still rings true to human experience. In her novel Northanger Abbey (1817), for instance, the heroine Catherine Morland makes a statement that is amazingly prescient about the modern boredom with history.